See the Internet security
section for more information on general Internet security
issues. The primary security risks for Usenet are the absence of
confidentiality
and
the
potential to
attract spam email, as described below:

Confidentiality.
There is no confidentiality on the Usenet, and anyone's postings can be read
by anyone else
with access to the Internet. Your postings are almost certainly archived,
and will be accessible for years -- for example, the Google Groups database goes back more than twenty years. Note that these archives can be searched
by email address and other keywords (like your name) to find all your postings going back many years.

You can prevent some archiving with the x-no-archive
command. But, in general, you shouldn't post anything to the newsgroups you might later mind being part of the Usenet permanent record.

Spammers.
Spam emailers run automatic programs that read the newsgroups and pickup
email addresses. They store these
email addresses in a database, and then sell them to marketers that send you unwanted
spam email. You can guard against this by taking the precautions described in the section on how to disguise your email
address.